


Sometimes our best is not enough

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Doom Patrol (TV)
Genre: Bad Parenting, Dialogue Heavy, Drinking & Talking, Emotional Baggage, Fatherhood, Gen, Heart-to-Heart, Random & Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:15:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26772028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Maybe they could have been better fathers. Maybe they didn't try enough.
Relationships: Cliff Steele & Larry Trainor
Kudos: 11





	Sometimes our best is not enough

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was such a drag to write and I don't know why I tried it? Like, I haven't seen any of the show, but I have a little notebook where I write down things I want to write and stuff, and this was one of them, though I don't know why I started it now all of a sudden? Anyway, I don't like this fic, but I hope that someone out there does.

Maybe Cliff shouldn't have been so surprised to find Larry seated all alone at the dining table, curled up on two chairs and holding a cool beer bottle in his hand. He didn't even glance up when Cliff entered, despite the amount of racket his metal body was making, with its squeaks and thumps and rattling.

"Uh," Cliff asked as he pulled out a chair and carefully sunk down into it. If he still had a face, he would have winced at the ominous way it creaked. "What's going on with you?"

He watched as Larry brought the lip of the bottle to his mouth and took a long swig. "Just in the middle of an existential crisis."

"Oh," Cliff said. "So nothing new then."

They sat together until Cliff was beginning to think it was getting awkward. He watched as Larry methodically brought the beer bottle to his lips before pulling away with a faint glass and resting it back down on the mahogany table. He knew without a doubt that both Rita and the Cheif would blow a gasket if they caught him doing that without a coaster. It wasn't the worst thing to ever happen to it, he supposed, but still, light condensation rings weren't the most ideal things to be staring at during meals. If Cliff had still been his normal self, his older self, then his patience would have run out long ago, but now, made of nothing but copper and bolts and grey matter, he found that he could wait all day. Though just because he couldn't didn't mean that he wanted it to.

"Do you ever wonder what you did to deserve to be a father?" Larry eventually asked, cracking just as Cliff had expected him too, given enough time and silent peer-pressure. "And how you could have ever let yourself fuck it up so bad?"

"Oh," Cliff repeated, not too surprised, as he tilted his head to the side with the grinding of metal and the creaking of bolts. "It's one of those days, huh?"

"Well, I don't know about you, but my family reunion didn't exactly go to plan," Larry sounded bitter, his breath whistling over the top of the bottle. The glass was still chilled, and the condensation was beginning to soak into the fabric of his bandages. "I told my son that my first and only love was a man, he called the Bureau of Normalcy. on me, and my estranged grandson was shot, possibly fatally, when they tried to capture me. So yeah, I guess you could say that it's one of those days."

There were many things that Cliff could have said to that, all of them rude or snarky, so he decided to say none of them, to bite his metaphorical tongue, and stare at the patch of charred, disfigured skin visible through the bandages around Larry's mouth, and considered whether or not the room would be irradiated just from that little bit of exposure, or if Cliff would be dead had he be made of skin. "But you were literally sent into space, turned into a hideous monster, and then taken by a shady underground government group. They know that, right?"

"Who knows?" Larry replied, not mentioning the impulsive comments that Cliff just couldn't hold back. "I'm guessing their mother told them some terrible things about me to try and soften the blow of me never coming back. Not that I can blame her. I'm sure she only told them the truth."

"Fuck Larry, you almost died," Cliff said. "And then you were kidnapped by the Bureau. She couldn't have even cut you a little slack?"

"Well," Larry said sourly. "When you find out that your husband and father of your children is having an affair with a man from work, I think you have a right to be a little bit... _bitter_."

"Holy fuck," Cliff said, sitting back. The poor wooden chair creaked again, straining against his bulk, and he could only imagine the inanimate wood screaming at the weight of him. "That's cold."

"That's life," Larry shrugged, bringing the bottle to his lips again. "So, what's up with you these days?"

Immediately, Cliff felt like an absolute asshole as once again, he felt the need to say the first thing that came into his head, and wanted to kick himself for it. But while they were on the topic of kids... "Clara's pregnant."

He suspected that the look Larry sent his way would have been akin shock or disbelief if Cliff had been able to see anything beneath his bandages. "No shit? I guess congratulations are in order."

Cliff shook his head, the releasing of pistons and the grinding of gears in his skull. "Not for me. She may be my daughter, but she grew up most of her life without me. I've been locked in a room for decades. How can you expect your daughter to want to know you when you're nothing but a brain in a tin can?"

For a moment, Larry just mused that over. "How did you find out?"

He gestured vaguely before answering. "She came here. She wanted to talk to me, to see if we can make this work somehow. I want it to, but I'm not optimistic. I've been burned before, so I'm not getting my hopes up yet."

Making a confused sound deep in his throat, Larry tilted his head to the side, and Cliff wondered if he was raising his eyebrows or narrowing his eyes behind his goggles. "Didn't she, like, call the cops on you or something?"

"Yeah, she did, but that's not important. I was being a prick," Cliff waved him off. "She came back though, so that's all the matters. I couldn't be there for her while she was growing up, but maybe I could be there for her and her baby."

Instead of answering, Larry just sat there silently, sipping at his beer. Nobody spoke for a few long moments until Cliff got fucking tired of the tense silence and doing nothing but sitting and waiting.

He cleared his throat, and Larry turned to look at him, clutching the bottle in a vice-like grip, his legs curled up to his chest. "You know, you shouldn't feel too bad about your kids. It's not your fault that you were taken by the Bureau. And besides, I think you must have done a good job for them to turn out the way they did, so you have to give yourself credit for that. You must have been a pretty good father, even if you might have been a pretty shitty husband."

But Larry merely shook his head. "Oh Cliff, how I wish that were true. Truth is, I never should have been a father. I didn't have it in me. And even though I loved those boys, I still couldn't do right by them. I think the best thing I ever did for those kids was leaving their lives for good. I never should have gone to Gary's funeral. I only made it worse. Reopened sore wounds and brought back bad memories," he laughed, but it was humourless and dull. "I couldn't just leave them be. Even all these years later, even technically dead, I still find ways to ruin their lives."

Cliff sighed, the metal robotised soundbox built into his throat rattled at the motion. "Look, man, I'm not trying to live your life or how to feel, but it sounds to me like you were a gay man in a time when being gay was frowned upon and you married a woman just because that was what was expected of you, and you tried to make the best of a shitty situation despite not really loving her, not wanting to be a father and loving another man behind her back. None of that shit would be happening now. Now, you don't have to get married and you don't have to have kids if you don't want them. You can love whoever you want, and don't have to be ashamed of being gay. You don't have to have affairs just to express who you really are. Things have changed now. So considering all the things put against you and the expectations you had to deal with, I think you probably could have done much worse than you did."

"Cliff," Larry said tightly, and Cliff thought that he might have been clenching his teeth. "I don't want to talk about _that_."

"Sure, whatever," Cliff said. "But I don't know about you, but I think that we did pretty good with our kids. I mean, yeah, we could have been there more and could have been better fathers and stuff, but considering how they could have turned out, I think they turned out pretty well. They could have been much worse. And no matter how little we were there, we have to admit that some of that is because of us."

Larry didn't answer, but Cliff was no idiot. He could see the way Larry's chest glowed a brilliant electric blue as the spirit in his chest made itself known in response to Larry's agitation, and he knew that it was high time to leave well enough alone. The light flared, bigger than Cliff had seen it in a long while, and decided to give him some space. He stood, the chair creaking in relief as he finally took his weight off of it, and he almost turned around and flipped it the bird, but that would have been stupid.

He tapped his fingers on the tabletop, making more sound than he expected it to, and moved his bulk away from the table and back the way he came. "Food for thought,"

Cliff left him there, alone with nothing but his bottle of beer and his electrified spirit and his thoughts.


End file.
